


Misfit

by ShadowPorpoise



Series: Undertale AU Short Works [2]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dreamtale (Undertale), Alternate Universe - Underswap (Undertale), Angst, Anxiety, Arguing, Bittersweet, Bittersweet Ending, Character Development, Dissociation, Drama, Drawing, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Friendship, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Breakdown, No Plot/Plotless, No Romance, No Smut, Not Canon Compliant, OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Psychological Trauma, Sequel, Sort Of, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:06:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29615418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowPorpoise/pseuds/ShadowPorpoise
Summary: Nightmare is giving him that funny look again... “Well, you can come in, you know.” Just like that. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.And it is, isn’t it? Or else Ink would’ve have come.-There is a place Ink calls home. He's just not sure... if he's happy.
Relationships: Dream & Nightmare, Ink & Blue, Ink & Dust, Ink & Nightmare, Sans & Sans (Undertale), dream & blue, ink & dream
Series: Undertale AU Short Works [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2175837
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Misfit

**Author's Note:**

> This does take place after the previous "one-shot" in this "series." It will make more sense if you've already read [that one.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28634682)

Ink can see it on the horizon. That inscrutable line he can never quite capture with his pen. It’s just imperfect enough, just not straight enough to render his most meticulously precise attempts void. He’s tried harder. He’s tried _not_ trying. Tried everything and nothing before he throws up his papers and his pen and scatters them on the wind. He can make more later, anyway. He’s good at that.

“I didn’t expect… to see you here,” comes a voice over a sort of drippy, draggy noise behind him.

Ink turns a little, but not enough to see. It’s a gesture of acknowledgement, more than anything else. Something he picked up at the house. Blue didn’t do it, when he was mad. And Ink isn’t mad, so he figures he’d better.

“You, uh…” Nightmare sort of gestures with his chin, notwithstanding the eight actual limbs he could’ve done it with. “Here to check up on me?”

Now Ink does look at him, right in the eye, but it doesn’t help. He doesn’t know what that means. So he says nothing, only sort of uselessly opens his mouth and then closes it again.

Nightmare stares at him, one tentacle twitching like the tail on an irritable cat. Dream looks at him that way, sometimes, and all at once Ink thinks he knows why. And Ink was angry, maybe, for an instant before he realized it was useless. All of it. So he’s smiling instead, just a little before he turns away.

The keeper of all negativity takes one hesitant step forward. Stops, at the crackle of paper beneath his foot. The slow spread of inky sludge all but swallows the original drawing.

“Nice… lines,” he remarks. And, “Thanks,” Ink tells him, out of habit before he realizes. Just another awkward social habit that he learned but can’t adjust. They really are nothing more than lines on a page, and he makes as though to gather them up again, save the soiled one.

A little huff like a laugh and Nightmare picks it up. And even this small gesture leaves him wide open for an attack - tentacles or no.

Ink only watches, and eventually reaches for it, the soiled page, and puts it with the others. It can’t be any worse than they are.

“Though I will say…” the betentacled skeleton continues, as though in response to some unspoken thought, “There’s not much else to draw out here.”

“That’s not true.” Sharp. Sudden, like a feeling, almost. But it’s not. True, that is. Even if he can’t draw it. The shuddering horizon, peeking out beneath the fog. The lonely upper levels of the house, on the edge by itself in the distance. It’s harder to get it down - what’s not there, than what is.

Nightmare is giving him that funny look again. “Oh?” He turns, and Ink almost dodges as they follow after him, the octopine weapons he has so many times deflected. But they don’t strike at him now. Or ever, really, when they weren’t struck at first. “Well, you can come in, you know.” Just like that. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

And it is, isn’t it? Or else Ink would’ve have come.

He gets up.

* * *

He thought he liked the noise. That’s what he told himself, when they made it. That it was better than silence, that anything was better than silence, and so he listened. Or rather, he heard. Because you have to want to listen, but hearing you can’t help.

And Ink couldn’t help. Not the hearing, not the noise, not the feelings he didn’t have. The feelings _they_ had, that crackled above and around him where he sat on the floor and didn’t feel them. Didn’t feel anything, or care to. He didn’t care, after all, when Dream cried, when Blue yelled and _made_ him cry. And since he didn’t care, he had no right to. To say anything, to do anything, to feel anything and so he didn’t, he didn’t even try to help it, to stop it. Only just sat in the corner and drew what he couldn’t feel, what he heard but didn’t see, what he saw but didn’t know, and all around him raged the noise and the sound and the emptiness ringing louder than the rest.

“Ink. Ink, stop it.” It was some months ago, when it was bad, maybe, only then he didn’t know. “You’ve been redrawing the same line for hours.” He cries out when Blue reaches for the pen, when he pries fit from his raw, swollen fingers and sets it aside.

Dream is standing over him, and giving him that odd look Ink hates so much. It’s an easy feeling, hate, and he lets it wash over him in a moment of powerfully lucid relief. Only, when he tries he finds no words to express it, no ability to communicate and so he says nothing.

“Hey.” Blue reaches for his hand, eliciting another sharp spasm of pain even in his clumsy attempts to be gentle.

“Be careful.” Dream blurts the words, though he hasn’t come closer, and Ink pulls his hand away. Buries his face in his arms.

“It’s fine,” he says, in a voice without tone. And he almost believes it. He has to.

Blue gets to his feet again. “I’ll get some ice. You stay there.” And there’s something in his voice, something low and intense Ink has never heard before.

Dream stays with him. Flops down on the couch and doesn’t look at him.

Ink fought for him earlier. Went up against Nightmare with him, and Blue. Ink liked those kind of fights. They got along well together, when they fought with someone else.

But then they got home. And they hadn’t stopped. Until now, when it was Ink they had to focus on.

“Did you get hurt earlier?” Blue asks him, pressing the ice ruthlessly into his hand, and Ink looks away.

“You shouldn’t draw for a while,” Dream pipes up from the couch, fiddling with one tattered corner of his scarf. “Not till it heals.”

And he didn’t. He waited, till he was better. And Dream was better too; he didn’t cry as much. And Blue didn’t yell, even when he told him to rest, when he told them both to rest and they didn’t.

But, “What’s going to happen now?” Ink asks them one day, much later, after Dream brought Nightmare here only not for a fight, he only fought with just the cat instead, the one Ink couldn’t pet.

“What do you mean?” Blue asks around a mouthful of toast, and puts the coffee on for his brother when he wakes up.

“Well… he’s…”

Dream looks up at him from the kitchen table. “Yeah, how are we gonna keep busy now?” And laughs.

Ink doesn’t think it is funny.

“Guess we’ll just go back to the way things were. Without all the injuries.” Blue is laughing too, before he stops. Abruptly. “Ink?” That low tone. Blue is looking at him. “You’re breathing.”

So he is. He doesn’t need to, none of them do, unless they want to speak. Ink covers his mouth with one hand and backs toward the kitchen door. “I’m going now.”

“Oh.” Dream looks disappointed. “Okay. See you later?”

Ink nods hurriedly and pushes through the opening. He hasn’t touched his sketchbook in months. It’s right where he left it that time beneath the chair, though the cat has taken the pen. He picks it up on his way out.

He might need it where he’s going.

* * *

Nightmare is under no delusions concerning Ink’s abilities. The silent, diminutive skeleton can transform a splatter of paint into a lethal weapon at will - before or after it hits you. Still, Nightmare has never truly sensed any special enthusiasm, any real intent to harm in his actions. Not that Nightmare has ever sensed much of anything, from Ink. At first he figured this was purely due to his peculiar way of processing emotion. Only gradually did he begin to recognize that Ink didn’t process his emotions at all, peculiarly or not. They were cut off, truncated somewhere between formation and development, and long before expression.

Today is no different, when the little artist comes up just behind him before he can shut the door. He doesn’t seem to know why he is here, anymore than Nightmare does.

“I let Dream have the room nearest the stairs, but he didn’t use it. You’re welcome to go up there whenever you want. He didn’t like the dark, or the quiet.”

Ink turns to him, sharply. “I don’t, either,” he says, with unexpected decisiveness. Ink very rarely seems to know his own mind.

“Yeah?” Nightmare slips past him, sending a cascade of dust into the air, and flips on a light. “Not a lot of people here, today,” he informs him, not entirely certain whom he means to reassure. A vague shuffling from the general direction of the table confirms at least one additional visitor, though. And hardly a visitor, now, really.

The stench of undeveloped fear.

“He’s fine,” Nightmare tells Ink, and shuffles on into the kitchen. Stops. Reconsiders. “Well, that’s a matter of perspective,” he amends with a white flash of teeth from the shadows by the stove. “But I’m guessing you don’t have much to worry about, considering the way the last skirmish turned out.”

“That’s…” The words won’t come, seemingly. Still, Ink makes no sign, doesn’t even stiffen when Dust’s shadowy form emerges from beneath the table, crawling over into one corner without a word. Ink actually seems to relax at the sight, at the realization they’re not alone, and eases back against the wall. Takes his cue from the other and sinks down, onto the floor. Reaches or his sketchbook.

Interesting.

Nightmare puts the teakettle on. Not for ink; he’s never seen the squid drink anything but his own feelings. And welcome he may be, as well as anyone, perhaps, but Nightmare is not about to switch up his routine over it.

They’re thick as thieves by the time the whistle goes off and Nightmare peaks at them over his book from his perch by the counter. A little pile of abandoned bones and dice and buttons lies forgotten as Dust peers intently over the artist’s shoulder. Neither one says a word, but Ink seems almost a little flattered to have gained such a silent, enraptured audience.

Nightmare flips off the burner and resumes reading.

* * *

Ink thought he wanted to be alone. That he wanted to hear the silence again, only when Dust turns he’s right behind him, following him from the room and backing up, now the other has stopped.

Dust tilts his head a little, down and to one side, the better to glare at him with that piercing, mostly crimson eye-light. He’s a bit taller than Ink, but not by much. “We… don’t fight here.” In a startling, almost gravelly voice.

Ink hugs his notebook to his chest. Ducks his head. “I’m not,” he says.

Dust surveys him a moment more before relaxing his stance. Glances over for Nightmare. But the guardian must’ve left some time ago - after all, it’s about that time, isn’t it? Dust looks back at the little artist, at the panicked way he grasps at his notebook, at the vice-like grip he’s got over his pen. “You’re tired?” he asks quietly, in a very different tone, and something breaks. Snaps, right out of Ink’s hand. The pieces clatter faintly to the floor before Ink does, on his knees and with his palms up in his his eyes to stop the tears, the blue and the red and the purple of them both, dripping around his fingers.

It’s the proximity, the heaviness of Nightmare’s aura that enabled this. That’s what Dust tells him as he crouches down again, reaching to pick up the fallen papers and set them to one side. “It’s okay,” he says, and reaches out a hand. Both hands, and holds the little star Sans like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “This is normal, here.”

It’s several minutes before Ink feels like himself again, if he ever was himself to begin with. He’s sitting on an old, fuzzy blanket in Dust’s room and wiping at his eyes. Dust led him up here, told him to sit until it passed and not to stop till he was through. He’s fiddling close by with some dice or something, maybe, by the adjacent wall and just a little out from under the broad circle of lamplight from the desk. In his other hand he holds the sketchbook, flipping through it on his knees.

Something about this makes Ink angry - or whatever passes for that feeling, riding on the last dregs of reddish paint left inside him.

But Dust speaks, chillingly, before he can. “Why do you draw if you hate it so much?”

Ink freezes. He had been about to crawl over, to take it back but now he stops. “I… what?”

Dust rests one small, bony hand over the page to save his place and looks up. His eyes are wide, horrified orbs in the near darkness. “You’re gonna throw these away, aren’t you?”

A myriad of colors, rising in Ink’s face. The heat. The rage. It is almost fully formed, enough for Nightmare to pick up on, surely, were he here. “N - Here, give it back,” he demands, with surprising force.

Dust scoots over, a little too close, really, for comfort, rigid and staring at something Ink wishes he couldn’t see. But he doesn’t hand it over, and he doesn’t stop. “You hate them, too? The worlds that you made?”

“I - No, just give it back.” All but frantic, now.

Dust doesn’t fight him now when he reaches for it. Only sits there a moment longer before shrugging flippantly, his whole demeanor changed in a moment, and shuffling back over to resume his game. “Good,” he says, without looking up. “We don’t like them, either.”

* * *

It isn’t entirely unusual for Ink to go missing for several days. But in light of recent developments, Dream can’t help but worry a little. Blue is too, if that row of polished silver is anything to go by. He always cleans when he gets worried.

They’ve been better lately. Dream and Blue. They were never very bad, Dream thinks, though if they were it was mostly just Blue being Blue. He worries, and that worry expresses itself more often than not in attempts to control. And if he can’t control _you_ , then he sticks to his kitchen. Dream never minded, much. Blue did the same thing with Papyrus. And anyone can see how close they are. He took it as a sign, maybe, that Blue cared. A reminder, when Dream began to doubt, like he always did. More than once, Dream might have been able to defuse their more combative exchanges. But he was used to it by then, and glad at least to be feeling _something,_ anything but the dull numbness he had developed toward negativity.

Ink was always in the middle of it. In the middle but not a part of it, and maybe that’s why Dream didn’t think that it would bother him, that it _did_ bother him until that day when he was drawing and they stopped. For the most part. By some unspoken agreement they probably should have spoken about long ago.

Blue doesn’t realize, Dream thinks, that they caused it - that day, on the living room floor, when they got him to stop drawing. And Dream doesn’t either, maybe, the way he ought. He’s never been very good at empathizing, at really _feeling_ what others feel, and not just sensing. At least, not when it comes to negativity. And maybe his brother can help that, now they’ve made up. Iff Dream can manage it, can manage to let himself feel it when the thought terrifies him far more than any real pain of his own.

“You going out?” Papyrus asks him over the top of his book. He’s got his feet pulled up on the couch the way that Blue doesn’t like, since he takes up most of the cushions, but Dream sits down anyways.

“Maybe,” he says, in a tone that means he will, and Papyrus snorts.

“Not like you to let us know. Or to linger,” Papyrus remarks, without seeming to expect an answer - which is good since he gets little more than a shaky sigh in response.

Papyrus sets the book down. “You good?” he asks, and Dream isn’t sure how to respond to that. He doesn’t spend much time with Papyrus. Always felt guilted, somehow, by his lack of positivity.

“Just tired,” he says, and averts his eye-lights.

“Lots been happening,” the taller skeleton concedes. “Worse, when it’s not you.”

Dream looks at him, really looks, for perhaps the first time. There’s an unexpected gentleness behind those sunken orange eye-lights, despite the sharpness in his words.

“It never is,” he says, and his face twists a little despite himself before he gets up again, suddenly. “I’m… I have to go.”

“Yeah. Look, kid - ” And will he ever stop calling Dream that, will he ever stop implying that when Dream is well over five hundred and far too old to be making these kinds of mistakes. But Dream does look at him, holds his gaze for several long, agonizing moments before the tears start to prick at the edges of his sockets again the way they always do. The way they always come whenever he needs them. And Papyrus turns away, finally - mercifully lets him go before they can spill. “What you do… It affects other people. Whether or not you wallow in the delusion that doesn’t. So don't... don't forget that.”

Dream shakes his head and turns to go. It’s not like he meant to, after all, in the first place.

* * *

Nightmare knows Dream is angry before he says anything, aura or no. Dream never was very good at disguising his emotions. Still, he puts on a show of being unbothered, unmoved and indifferent as he appears, unceremoniously, in the middle of the dining room. He’s quiet for a moment while he assesses the atmosphere. Then - “You’re keeping him here?” he asks coldly, quietly like Ink is of no more concern than a stray cat.

For his part, Nightmare doesn’t see the need to pretend. He hasn’t got anything to be ashamed of or to hide. Still, if this is to be their first argument since forming an uneasy - and perhaps brief- alliance, he would rather it resulted from something more than a hasty retort. “I don’t _keep_ anyone anywhere,” he manages without raising his voice or his temper. Only the barest swish of one tentacle up from the kitchen floor hints at a subtle unease.

“Well, why else would he…” Dream trails off before it’s too late to stop, though even he knows the damage done. And it’s just that realization preventing Nightmare from popping off at him for it.

“Maybe you should ask him that,” he says with a gentleness that surprises even himself, and returns to his book.

“ ’S what I came to do,” Dream grumbles, pouting just like normal now, and surlier than ever. Whether or not he intends in this way to diffuse the situation isn’t clear, but he does and watches it fade, chased away by that half-moon grin Nightmare can’t prevent.

“Be my guest; he’s upstairs.” And just like that, disaster is avoided.

* * *

Dust’s presence is a calm, awkward indictment of every aspect of normalcy Ink was made to get used to. He doesn’t say much, doesn’t _do_ much at all by way of friendship or even polite inclusion. He simply exists, without fanfare or apology, and all the while letting Ink do the same. Dust talks to himself more than to Ink, and when he does ask questions they are pointed and unsubtle, lacking in even the most basic of social graces, and Ink finds himself more than glad to be relieved of that burden, that inconceivable practice of acceptable modes of communication. Once, Dust brought back some sort of snack from downstairs - and Ink, never having tried in earnest to like normal food, stared at it uncomprehendingly for quite some time before Dust wordlessly slid some over to him. He didn’t watch to be sure Ink ate it, or nag him about the benefits of nutrition. It ended up sitting there for half a day before Ink got up the nerve to try it at all, and even then Dust didn’t ask him what he thought of it.

Ink even starts to speak unbidden one day, breaking a silence of almost two days on his own.“What are you playing?” he asks without introduction, and Dust doesn’t respond for several minutes. It’s like that here; there are no rules concerning what one can ask or must answer. Ink all but gives up waiting to hear before he finally gets one.

“Not playing,” Dust rasps in that gravelly voice of his, and scoops up the scraps of bone and dice and buttons again. “Reading.”

“Oh.” Pause. “What’s it say?”

A sharp glance from his companion. “He.”

“He,” Ink repeats out of habit, and ducks his head. He’s been staring at an empty page for quite some time, unable even to think of drawing anything.

“Mmm.” Dust reexamines the newest pattern his pieces have made upon the floor. “Something about…” he shuffles them a little. “I’m not sure.” He looks up, with eyes like glowing reddish orbs beneath the shadow of his hood. “I don’t always… understand.”

“Oh.” And, “Me neither.” Though who he means Ink doesn’t now, and Dust doesn’t seem to think he’s said anything particularly wrong. There’s nothing wrong to say, here.

Ink never moves, from this room. He falls asleep each night curled up on that blanket against the wall, watching the dull glow of the lamp and listening the skittery, almost comforting sounds from the opposite corner.

One night he wakes up and he knows there is another presence in the house, one he knows well as opposed to those of the frequent, rowdy strangers who come visiting often down below. Dust usually joins them, but they aren’t here tonight and so the two of them remain, silent and watchful, as Dream sidles into view from the hallway.

Oddly, and with a wary glance at Dust, he doesn’t set foot within the doorway. Still, there is something tense in his manner, something tense in _Ink’s_ manner at the sight of him that elicits no subtle reaction from Dust, who stiffens visibly and with a look to almost kill, although he doesn’t move.

“We don’t fight here,” he informs them both sternly, or perhaps just Dream since he’s the only one he looks at.

Ink thinks he ought to say something, and so he does, falling back with surprising swiftness into conforming to what is expected of him. “I’m sure he doesn’t mean to,” he stammers, and shakes his head at the look of utter disbelief Dust shots at him.

“I don’t,” Dream confirms, and beckons somehow, without moving, for Ink to follow him.

Ink is up in a moment. Dust says nothing when he goes, but Ink, compelled by an old, learned compulsion, informs him that he’ll be right back.

A familiar, harshly uplifting aura envelopes him as he steps out into the hallway. Perhaps it is the contrast of the location, or even Ink’s own newly heightened senses that enable him to perceive the inexplicable dampness, the softening of recognized sorrow at the edges of the intangible light. For the first time, and under little to no social obligation, Ink knows what it means to actually want to hug someone, to embrace them and chase away the pain in a moment of unrehearsed affection. But, “Are you alright?” he asks instead, since Dream rarely seems to like it when he’s hugged, and Ink doesn’t figure he’s very good at it anyway.

Dream snorts, all but tripping over his own feet as he turns to tread a little too quickly down the stairs. Ink follows him, up the hall and down the steps, out finally into the open air. There’s a sudden emptiness as Ink vacates the building, a well-known lack of direction for his emotions, and he withers a little where he stands, just beneath the awning of the doorway.

He stiffens in surprise when Dream hugs him after all, all of a sudden and in clear effort to provide just that sort of comfort Ink wanted to back in the hallway. Still, whatever Ink felt earlier he can’t return it, not now. He closes his eyes and allows himself in an instant to let go, of whatever he never let himself hold onto.

Dream is shaking a little when he says it - a trembling, inexplicable word over Ink’s shoulder without a thought. “ _Sorry_.”

Ink stares blankly out into the foggy, indistinguishable nothing. “For what?”

A shudder - no, that’s definitely a sob, and Dream won’t let him go. “ _That_ ,” he says definitively as he chokes over his own unnecessary breath and Ink tries to make him stop.

“D… Please don’t… cry,” he gets out in a panic and Dream pulls away, wiping at his eyes. Ink studies him, wide-eyed and terrified, and in a moment he has assessed every word, every expression, every movement he might’ve got wrong to make this happen, to do what Blue does, to make Dream worried again, and Dream _is_ worried again and calling to him from very far away.

“Ink, don’t… If I had known it would bother you, the way we talked, I never would have… I just… I can’t feel it when you…”

Ink comes back to the present with a snap, blinking and thinking maybe he might know what Dream is talking about now, although he isn’t sure. He doesn’t know what to say at first, and so for a bit he doesn’t try. Then -“I’m not… bothered,” he ventures finally, to which Dream shakes his head violently, and turns around again. He’s hugging himself, the way Nightmare does with his tentacles, and something about that is funny. Ink smiles a little and follows him, stopping close and just behind and to one side. “I’m not, anymore,” he amends when he can, and Dream shoots him a look, first of surprise and then of knowing disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, and doesn’t cry this time. “I should’ve told Blue a long time ago… Only maybe, he wouldn’t have stopped nagging. But I could still have…”

But Ink doesn’t want to blame Blue. The thought of it, of any of it nauseates him suddenly. Dream knows that look and stands down. But Ink doesn’t vomit, or even come close to it. He just wants to go back inside. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it,” he snaps, much to his own surprise - and Dream’s, if those raised brow-bones are anything to go by. “I hate… I hate talking about it,” Ink insists, with renewed vigor, and all but stamps his bony foot on the cold ground. “I hate thinking about it. I hate _hearing_ about it.” His mouth hurts. He’s holding his head. He doesn’t know where any of it came from, only that he’s furious, that great red tears of fury are rising in his eyes and it’s worse than it was on that first day because no amount of hugging will make it go away, he just wants to scream and _destroy_ it, whatever tenuous familial bond he has formed with either of them because he hates it, he hates it and never knew it until now.

Nightmare is in the doorway. Still and silent. Watchful. Ink didn’t even know that he was here. Evidently Dream didn’t either, or he wouldn’t have started back like he’d been slapped and stumbled away from both of them. There’s a blinding, dizzying, _infuriating_ incomprehension in his eyes, and Ink hates that too. He wants to strike him, to strike it right out of his face, that stupid, well-meaning, idiotic, broken attempt at kindness, at inclusion, at _fixing_ what doesn’t need to be fixed.

“Easy.” Nightmare’s voice, smooth as satin, as velvet only he isn’t talking to Ink. “It’s all gotta come out now.”

There’s a dull ringing sound, just on the edges of what Ink is capable of hearing. Then a splash, and a splatter. Red paint, on the stones and in the dirt and on the house and in the sky. Crimson, bloody rain comes down in a deluge of unintended destruction. He’s creating and destroying, building up and tearing down more quickly than he can think of it, all murky, muddy crimson shapes forming cityscapes and climbing mountains on the horizon, melting down to bloody rivers and splaying out in swarming orangish mists.

The house is unharmed. Only rocked a little on its foundations before things settle. Ink’s brush remains untouched on his back. Sounds as though something like a spinning top is in there, right in the middle of his head, which throbs every time it dips. “Sorry,” he garbles, letting go his own face and trying to straighten. He feels strangely light, like he’ll float away if he tries to walk.

Nightmare doesn’t move except to shrug. “No problem. Not usually this… explosive,” he concedes, “But this isn’t abnormal.”

Dream is struck dumb somewhere out in front of him. Up above, somewhere on the second level, the curtains flutter.

* * *

Ink decides to leave the next day.

“You’re going back now?” Dust asks him; back, not home - though neither one is very accurate, now.

"Thank you," Ink tells him, by way of response, and Dust shrugs. Turning once again without a thought to his readings.

“You’re welcome back, any time,” Nightmare tells him at the door; back, not home - since even this place isn't very accurate, to that name.

Dream leads the way like he’s accomplished some sort of mission, though even that subtle sag of his shoulders is enough to undermine the triumph. Blue seems to know something is wrong when they walk in, since he fumbles with wholly uncharacteristic awkwardness in trying to welcome them home.

Back, not home.

All through dinner they’re quiet, the four of them, and long-faced enough for it to be their last meal.

Blue is trembling as he clears the table and Papyrus tries unsuccessfully to dispel the awkwardness. “So, you actually ate this time,” he observes placidly. “Haven’t seen that before.”

Something clatters over by the sink. Papyrus glances up sharply and gets to his feet with a resigned sort of sigh. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Gotta catch a few z’s, ya know.”

The resulting snort is late and forced. Blue doesn’t move from the sink as his brother shuffles away. Then - “Why.” It’s sharp, and not at all hesitant.

Ink glances at Dream. Then at the table cloth. “I’m s - ”

“No.” Blue turns, and he’s smiling bitterly, still grasping the counter behind him for support. “No, you’re not. And you shouldn’t be. I just wanna know why. What’d I ever…” His voice breaks suddenly, belying the confidence, contrasting with the erectness of his posture. He drops his gaze for a moment. Gathers himself. Looks back up with a steely glint in his eye-lights. “Doesn’t matter. I just… I tried my best, you know.”

Dream is silent in his seat. Looking at the floor.

Ink folds his hands together. “I… I know.” And he does know. How Blue sacrificed to provide them a place, the homeless little outcodes with far more responsibility than either one of them could even begin to bear. The only one, on any of the worlds, to try and see them as they were and not as they ought to be.

And Dream did find a home here. A chaotic home, sometimes, filled with all sorts of mistakes and learning experiences for all of them. He’d made it work - the two brothers had made it work, and welcomed a third. But…

“I love you,” Ink tells tells both of them suddenly because he knows that it is true only now he’s leaving. “I just… can’t stay.”

It didn’t work, for him. He knows that now. He knows it now because he can feel it, he can feel his own discomfort, his own dissatisfaction with it now he knows what it means to be unhappy.

“Will you still come back, to… to visit?” Blue asks then, with surprising calmness. He doesn’t try and argue with Ink, the way he does with Dream.

Ink considers. Then - “Yes,” he concludes definitively, and leaving no room for doubt - even in Blue’s poor, overly anxious head.

At some point between the kitchen and the door there comes a sort of spontaneous, three way embrace that not a one of them particularly started.

“You’re still family, okay?” Blue chokes out from somewhere within the huddle. “Even if you don't live here - Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.” And he means it. That he can’t forget, no matter where he goes or for how long. Just like he can’t forget the towering dark house on a foggy, formless world with an imperfect horizon. He’s got family there, too, and they’re keeping his sketchbook for him, in a corner under a dusty desk. He’ll be back to pick it up - and to visit, like Blue said.

Just as soon as he can find a place, a way that’s only his.

**Author's Note:**

> The beautiful artwork in the middle is a commission by my friend [Queezle.](https://quezq.tumblr.com/post/644315441473404928/commission-for-the-lovely-shadowporpoise-a-scene)


End file.
